The Coffee Desk

Conficker Behind Social Media Outage?

So Twitter is down today along with Facebook, LiveJournal, and other miscellaneous social media outages/slowdowns.

Is this the finally rise of Conficker, the “sleeping bear” virus?

In a word, I have no idea nor do I have confirmed reports. But, you could always go check your Aunt’s computer to see if it is sending an excessive amount of traffic AND it can’t ping avg.com.

4chan and 7chan are quiet, and if anything they also complain about the Twitter downtime. Likewise with other well-known (and therefore large) hacker circles from various IRC and USENET groups.

Some have suspected Defcon to be a suspect in this outage, but I don’t think any of the security specialists there are stupid enough to do something like this. No, this is both too large and too covert to be something from Defcon; if anything, it’s happening at the same time to make Defcon a red herring.

More on this as I investigate, but it is very likely that this could be the result of a massive worm not unlike Conficker.

In other news, lesser-known social media outlets like Plurk! remain intact, largely because nobody gives a flying shit about Plurk.

(this post is also designed to take the heat off of Anthony for his latest post – oops )